12
II 7,856 16,848
III 5,903 15,968
IV 5,900 16,148
V 4,805 15,264
VI 2,494 16,482
----- ------
Average 5,549 Average 16,020

MISSISSIPPI SOUTH CAROLINA

District. Total Vote, 1898. District. Total Vote, 1898.

I 2,468 I 4,559
II 3,175 II 4,138
III 2,661 III 4,361
IV 4,551 IV 4,632
V 5,105 V 4,230
VI 6,071 VI 4,916
VII 3,605 VII 4,938
----- -----
Average 3,948 Average 4,539

The total congressional vote of Louisiana which elected six members to
Congress is less by nearly 500 votes than the average for one district
in Iowa. _One elector in Louisiana exercises about seven times as much
power in Congress as one in Ohio._ The average congressional vote of
Mississippi for seven districts is nearly 35,000 votes less than the
average for twenty-one districts in Ohio, while the total congressional
vote of South Carolina for seven Congressmen is more than seven thousand
below the total vote of a single congressional district in North
Carolina. The total vote cast in the twenty congressional districts of
South Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi in the election of 1898 was
91,184; while that polled in the ten congressional districts of
Wisconsin was 332,204. Thus, although these states cast nearly two
hundred and fifty thousand votes less than the state of Wisconsin, they
control twice as much power as that state in the national legislature.

The southern people themselves can not permit these violent
infringements of the principles of republican government to continue
without irrevocable detriment to their best and highest interests. In
the degree that they stand by in silence and see the Negro stripped of
his civil and political rights by a band of unscrupulous men who seek
no higher end than their personal aggrandizement, they compromise their
own civil and political freedom, and put in jeopardy the industrial
progress of th